Cancer epigenetics: Now harvesting fruit and seeding for common diseases.

Epigenetics is now known to almost all researchers because it is a fundamental mechanism for life and disease. This is evidenced by the fact that as much as 0.83% of all the literature published in 2014 (from January to October) in PubMed contained the keyword of epigenetics. When publication trends are looked back on (Fig. 1), we can recognize three upsurges in epigenetics. The first was in the mid-1980s, the second in the mid-1990s, and the third in the early 2000s. The first upsurge came after the discovery of global hypomethylation in cancer, and the second came after the discovery of inactivation of tumor-suppressor genes by aberrant DNA methylation.